The Judas ship [Hardcover]

Brian Callison (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Collins; First edition (1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0002220075
• ISBN-13: 978-0002220071
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,324,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Callison is the author of 22 best-sellers published by HarperCollins, Severn House, Futura, and Ostara. His novels have been translated into over a dozen languages including Japanese, Polish, Icelandic and Finnish. They have been printed in Braille, released as audio books, issued in large print editions and are used as creative writing references by several international learning institutions.

A former Merchant Navy officer sailing in cargo liners to Australia and the Far East, Callison subsequently worked in commerce before becoming a full-time author. Following service with the 51st Highland Division Provost Company (TA), Royal Military Police, he returned to his seafaring roots to maintain an active 35-year connection with ships as a Naval Control of Shipping Officer in the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service.

More recently he completed a three-year tenure at the University of Dundee as a Fellow of The Royal Literary Fund. His latest title to be reissued in print is 'A Flock Of Ships' (Ostara Publishers 2011: also available on Amazon Kindle). On first publication of that now-classic work, Alistair McLean wrote, "The best war story I have ever read. No qualifications, no reservations, no exceptions as to type and time: it's the best. Makes 'All Quiet On The Western Front' look like one of the lesser works of Enid Blyton".

He continues to help new writers become published writers (www.writermentoring.co.uk). 'Hopefully putting something back into a trade that has been good to me.' Writing: guiding aspiring novelists: teasing out the very essence of professionally-competent authorship is what he excels at, and he submits a portfolio comprising some two million published words as evidence.

'A Ship is Dying' is his second title to be published in electronic format. A further 17 Callison titles are scheduled for release as Kindle eBooks during the winter/ spring period 2011/2012.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grittiest story ever told, October 5, 2004

By 

N. Dubeski (Hamilton, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Judas ship (Hardcover)

The Judas Ship is a riveting sea-faring yarn of a (doomed) ammunition ship in World War Two that ends up in a Mexican standoff with a German surface raider off the coast of South America. The British crew is decimated in the first minutes of being ambushed and is set on fire. The first mate takes charge, and is soon caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. While his remaining crew fight desperately to keep the fire away from the artillery shells that are heating up hot enough to fry eggs, the first mate has to make a series of painful and uncompromising decisions on how to safeguard the ship--pursuing the disobvious and eschewing the easy route--by steering his ship AWAY from the nearest help for the burning ship and critically injured crewmembers. The struggle just to survive taxes the men's endurance as they toil bleeding and ragged under the tropical sun without food and drinking water--and then they run up against the very same surface raider that devastated them earlier. Again, they are confronted with the most difficult choices known to Man--do they take the easy way out, and surrender to the Germans (to get medical help), compromise with them (to escape), or do they do their duty as members of the Merchant Marine so that the raider cannot kill any more allied seamen, even at the expense of their own lives?
The Judas Ship is told in a very naturalistic style that seems to complement that heroic (Romanticist) themes involved, instead of undermining them. The characters aren't noble Saturday morning cartoon heroes, they are British seamen, uneducated and uncouth, but they fight to uphold the values of seamen everywhere--to survive with honor.